Getting a good job at the end of three or four years of studying is increasingly seen as a minimum requirement for students who are leaving university with an average of £44,000 in student loan debt.
But what courses will give you the best chance of paying back your student loans quickly? Some have a 100% track record in students landing high-skilled jobs within 15 months of leaving. The worst – health studies at the University of Bedfordshire – records just 4% of graduates being in high-skilled jobs.
New rankings for 78 of the most popular subjects – published in this guide for the first time this year – give a 60% weighting to two measures of success in the graduate jobs market to reflect their importance in applicant decision making.
This is split between the proportion of graduates gaining high-skilled jobs (40%) and whether they feel their careers are on track 15 months after leaving university (20%).
Out of more than 4,000 courses analysed, 103 record a perfect high-skilled graduate employment record. Many are in areas where a high-skilled job is a near-guaranteed outcome – medicine (at 22 universities), dentistry (12), nursing and midwifery (9) and physiotherapy (11) account for more than half the total.
New rankings for 78 of the most popular subjects – published in this guide for the first time this year – give a 60% weighting to two measures of success in the graduate jobs market
Even the worst-performing dental school at the University of Central Lancashire sees 85.7% of graduates gain high-skilled jobs.
However, in other subject areas performance is much more variable. Four universities – Durham, Imperial College London, Leeds and Manchester – have a 100% record in graduates landing high-skilled jobs in computer science, but getting a top job after studying the subject at Roehampton (56%), East London (58.1%) and West London (61.8%) appears to be a matter of less computer-like precision.
Not so much a case of what you study, but where you study.
Civil engineering is similarly variable. Students at six universities – Birmingham, Derby, Plymouth, Queen’s Belfast, Salford and Southampton – build great careers for themselves, all of them gaining high-skilled jobs, while those at Bradford (65.3%), De Montfort (70.8%) and Bolton (73.8%) have much less secure foundations.
Cardiff and Leeds universities have the most subjects (five) with 100% high-skilled jobs records. Cardiff’s success is founded on its strength in medicine and healthcare (medicine, dentistry, pharmacology, pharmacy and physiotherapy) while Leeds has a strong showing in computing (computer science, artificial intelligence, computer games and animation, dentistry and medicine).
Many universities and subjects don’t feature at all in the 103 with the perfect employment records. Childhood and youth studies (at Brighton) and politics (at the London School of Economics) are among those that appear just once, although the LSE’s presence as the sole representative from politics should be no surprise when it can count 42 current or former world leaders among its alumni.
Overall, across all universities the subjects with the highest proportions of graduates in high-skilled work are predictably those in medicine and healthcare. Medicine and veterinary medicine lead the way on (both 98.7%), followed by dentistry (98.5%), nursing and midwifery (93.6%), physiotherapy (93.2%) and pharmacy (93.1%).
Two of the most popular university degree choices, psychology (with 100,380 undergraduates in 2022-23) and history (31,980 undergraduates), are among the five with the worst employment records with barely half of the graduates ending up in high-skilled employment 15 months after leaving university.
The full bottom five is sociology (51.8%), psychology (52.1%), performing arts (52.5%), social policy (53.7%) and history (55.1%).
At individual course level, some of the graduate employment figures are even more shocking. There are just under 350 instances where less than half of graduates end up in high-skilled graduate employment. The five subject areas with the worst records for graduates securing high-skilled jobs are health studies at Bedfordshire (4%), sociology at Buckinghamshire New (17.1%), social policy and sociology at Ulster (24% and 25% respectively) and history a Bangor (25.1%).
So, if getting a high-skilled job after your degree is important to you then it pays to choose both your course and where you want to study wisely. Use our University Finder to identify the top-ranked courses and universities. With job outcomes and student experience at their heart, our subject tables point the way towards both an enjoyable university experience and great jobs afterwards.
